4 Steps to Drive Operational Excellence - Read the whitepaper today!

How do we ensure excellence in the modern data-center? Top 4 Steps to Drive Operational Excellence

What makes an IT organization operationally excellent? Can the credit be given exclusively to IT professionals that put in long hours and extra effort? Perhaps. But, most would agree that in order to achieve excellence, the IT ecosystem must align with the needs of rest of the business; otherwise, silos and other bottlenecks can sabotage quality of service and end-user satisfaction. Therefore, the credit of achieving excellence must be shared between our talented staff and the amazing tools that supplement the efforts of these IT professionals. These tools create a foundation for success, enabling the capability for IT to have “the right information at the right time, every time.”

While innovation is what we strive for, our everyday IT workloads and an increasingly complex IT infrastructure prevent us from achieving that kind of excellence we want. Businesses are extending data, voice, video and applications to a broader set of users in a distributed workforce, and the success of the business is more and more dependent upon technology performance. The question becomes: “how do you simplify complexity and drive operational excellence in your IT organization?

Operational excellence can only be achieved with when IT pros have access to the right performance and operations management tools. Follow these top 4 steps to drive operational excellence in your virtual environment:

1. Have a single version of the truth: What happens when an application slows down, or worse yet, fails? Every organization has been there – our work environment turns into an “IT war room” with admins from different departments all playing the blame game. The only way companies can actually resolve these conflicts is to have complete transparency across the IT stack. As result, it’ll be easier to achieve truly comprehensive performance monitoring, capacity planning, and configuration management.

2. It’s crucial that your data-center management tool is extensible: Similar to a central command center, your tool must interface with the physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, databases, applications, and even cloud infrastructures all at once. Data from all these sources must be correlated and analyzed to generate that “single version of the truth”.

3. Manage your data-center proactively: Data-centers are complex beings. In order to effectively manage one, it’s important to be proactive. With the right software in place, you can run your datacenter proactively by tracking and correlating changes, right sizing, preventing bottlenecks and providing actionable insight.

4. Ensure optimization: There are three important pieces to keep in mind when working towards operational excellence; they include visualization, analysis and optimization. In order to optimize something you must be able to have a complete picture of it and visualization in the data-center is no different.